A Shandaken Project

Paint School is a free master class in the theory and practice of painting produced by Shandaken Projects. This lecture-based program brings twelve fellows together with six individuals widely recognized as among the most exceptional painters working today, with the aim to enrich the discourse of contemporary painting through peer exchange.

The Paint School exhibition features new work by members of the inaugural (2017-18) cohort, including: Benny Merris, Caroline R. Kent, Cynthia Daignault, Crys Yin, Gloria Maximo, Iman Raad, Jarrett Earnest, Lindsay M. Burke, Matthew Dale Fischer, Morgan Mandalay, Sophie Grant, and Tim Wilson. These individuals were mentored through Paint School by artists Josephine Halvorson, Byron Kim, Ulrike Müller, Howardena Pindell, and Faith Ringgold, as well as Ian Alteveer, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. The theme of the inaugural session of Paint School was “the future of painting,” a topic that work included in the exhibition addresses. The program used pedagogy and discussion to investigate this theme and welcomed individuals of all career levels as participants.

“Paint School is an electrifying new chapter for Shandaken Projects,” said its director Nicholas Weist. “We heard from artists that they desired for more tools for community-building and self-cultivation, so we broadened our focus on residencies to include this educational initiative. We’re excited to show off the results with this exhibition, and to partner with an organization as artist-centric as The FLAG Art Foundation.”

Inspired by alternative educational initiatives like Black Mountain College, Paint School is unaccredited but extraordinarily rigorous, and presented in the style of a post-graduate fellowship. Meetings of this program took place throughout New York City, at partner institutions including The Cooper Union, New York University, Abrons Art Center, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, among others. This free program runs December through May each year.

About:

Shandaken Projects supports cultural advancement through public programs and artist services. These opportunities are focused on process, experimentation, and dialogue, and are aimed particularly at important but under-served individuals. Through our free residency programs Shandaken: Governors Island and Shandaken: Storm King, our free educational initiative Paint School, and our commissions, public programs, and exhibitions, we create possibilities for cultural practitioners to forge new pathways in their work and in the world. We believe that research, experimentation, and the pursuit of new ideas are vital steps in the progress of culture, and that the creative community must safeguard space for them. We provide an alternative organizational model and significant opportunities for this community in an independent environment. Shandaken Projects is intentionally small-scale.

Lindsay M. Burke (b. Ames, Iowa, 1991) is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Burke received her BFA from the University of Iowa in 2014 and her MFA from Hunter College in 2017. In 2016, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and is a current participant in the Shandaken Paint School. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Rose Gallery in Brooklyn and group exhibitions at Ortega y Gasset Projects, New York, NY; Mom’s Gallery, New York, NY; Kunstraum LLC, Brooklyn, NY; and Field Projects: Casual Art Fair, New York, NY.

Cynthia Daignault is an artist and writer living and working in Baltimore, MD, and New York, NY. Daignault received a BA from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, where she studied art and art history. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and has been exhibited in many major museums and galleries including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Fort Worth Modern, White Columns and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Daignault is the former associate director of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres foundation and a published author, including the Sean Landers monograph, Improbable History. In 2018, the first major monograph of her work will be released in conjunction with the exhibition of her monumental work Light Atlas at the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR.

Sophie Grant (born 1985 in Santa Cruz, CA) lives and works in New York, NY. Grant received a BA from The University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2008, and an MFA from Hunter College, New York, NY, in 2015. In 2015 she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Grant is a current resident at the Hercules Art Studio Program and has been a past resident of the Keyholder Program at the Lower East Side Printshop, New York, NY;  the Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL; the Pajama Factory, Williamsport, PA; and Painting’s Edge, CA. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Matinee Projects, New York, NY, and a group show at Left Field Gallery, San Luis Obispo, CA. In 2016, Grant started the monthly works-in-progress series CLINIC. Grant has been working as an educator at The Whitney Museum of American Art and as a full spectrum doula.

Matthew Dale Fischer (b. 1981) is a current fellow in Shandaken Projects’ Paint School. Originally from Wisconsin, Fischer now lives and works in New York City where he has shown at Jack Tilton Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery, 247365, Louis B James, and Eddy’s Room. He has been a fellow in residence at The Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island, NY, and twice at The Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, NY. Fischer has been a visiting critic at Cooper Union, SUNY-New Paltz, Parsons and Pratt Institute. He earned an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from The University of Wisconsin-River Falls. He currently teaches painting at the 92Y and art history at the Central Queens Y. Fischer grew up in the woods of Wisconsin where he developed a personal connection to trees, plants, water and space, which have become keystones of his work.

Working within the historied language of abstract painting, Caroline Kent investigates how that language is understood amidst highly subjective cultural contexts. Kent’s painting practice is a constant pursuit of concretizing a language that speaks beyond the corridor of a traditional painting practice to engage subjects related to the moving image as well as the written word. Kent earned her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2008. Her work has been exhibited at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Suburban, Chicago, IL; Unisex, Brooklyn, NY; and The Union for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE. She is the recipient of awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation. Kent is co-founder of the Bindery Projects, an artist run exhibition space founded in Saint Paul, MN.

Morgan Mandalay (b. 1985) lives and works between Brooklyn, NY, and San Diego, CA, where along with being an artist, he is the founder and director of the exhibition project SPF15. Mandalay has had solo exhibitions at City Limits, Oakland, CA; ARTBO’s “Proyectos,” Bogotá, Columbia; Yautepec, Mexico City, Mexico; and Helmuth Projects, San Diego, CA. His work has been included recently in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; DAMA, Turin, Italy; 0-0, Los Angeles, CA; David B. Smith Gallery, ‪Denver, CO; Galleria Acapella, Naples, Italy; Left Field, San Luis Obispo, CA; LVL3, Chicago, IL; Green Point Terminal, Brooklyn, NY; and Yautepec, Mexico City, Mexico. Upcoming exhibitions include a curated group exhibition at Kimberly Klark in Queens, NY, and a solo presentation at STABLE in Santa Rosa, CA. Mandalay was a member of the initial curatorial committee for Space 4 Art in San Diego and also was the founder and director Sunday Project in Chicago, IL. In 2017, he completed his MFA at University of California San Diego, and holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Gloria Maximo (b. 1978, Rockville Centre, NY) received her BA from Antioch College in Ohio. Maximo’s work has been included in exhibitions at Metro Pictures Gallery (2018); Queens Museum (2017); Bridget Donahue Gallery, NY (2016); MOMA P.S.1, NY (2014); Palais de Tokyo, France (2012); and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR (2010). Maximo was a finalist for the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize for painting. Her work is included in the upcoming Queens International Biennial.

The installation Poor Woman of the Village is the final piece in a group of works, which includes video and performance, considering the subject of transiency, and invisibility. The title takes the name of the social realist painting by Courbet from 1866. The two benches are intended to resemble a typical gallery bench. They become a presentation area for the vulnerable painted surface of the plaster cast.

Born in 1978 and raised in Boise, Idaho, Benny Merris earned a BA from UMass Boston (2001) and an MFA at The Glasgow School of Art (2007). His expansive and experimental approach to abstraction conjures notions of Sympathetic Magic, mimesis, and embodied empathy. Merris has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, realized many large-scale, site-specific paintings, and was artist-in-residence at Denniston Hill, Catskills, NY (2015), and The Banff Center, Banff, Alberta, Canada (2011). Upcoming solo exhibitions include Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY, and Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY, both in 2018.

Iman Raad is an artist who currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Raad mounted his first solo exhibition in New York at Sargent’s Daughters gallery (2017), which was reviewed in The New York Times; and will participate in the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia (2018). His work presents a contradictory combination of beauty and fear and addresses humankind’s anxieties about existence by staging a traumatic scene of a disturbance in reality. He foregrounds ornamental elements as descriptive and expressive subjects, inverting the art historical narrative of ornament as a subordinate compositional feature. Traditionally beautiful and innocuous subjects like birds, fruits, and flowers, are extracted from familiar contexts and re-calibrated to deliver a narrative of our failures of hopes, our disease and disasters, and our weakness and pitifulness. His work is a fantastical encounter to an unknown belief system from-maybe-an unknown far future of human. Born in Mashad, Iran, Raad received his MFA in Painting and printmaking from Yale University in 2017.

Tim Wilson is a Brooklyn-based visual artist originally from Richmond, VA. His solo exhibitions include Something Rather Than Nothing, Sardine, Brooklyn, NY; PG-13 at Schroeder Romero, New York, NY; and See Me, Feel Me at 31 Grand, Brooklyn, NY, reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail. His works in group exhibitions have been presented at Recess, The Ulrich Museum of Art, Peres Projects, among others. Wilson received a B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University and an M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art. He was recently an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space on Governors Island.

Crys Yin lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work deals mostly with cultural misconnections and embracing the comedic side of personal experiences. She has exhibited at Adam Baumgold Gallery, Transmitter, and Victori+Mo. Yin has also participated in residencies with Ox-Bow, Lighthouse Works, ACRE, and Lower East Side Printshop.